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Wicked weather

5 August 2000

By Eugenie Samuel in London

DAMNED weather forecasters. I was looking forward to a spectacular storm, but
all I got was a night of shivering on the roof.

No, I wasn’t hoping to get drenched; I wanted to see my first Northern
Lights. Space weather forecasters had predicted that on the nights of 8 and 9
June, a magnetic storm raging around the Earth would create auroras in the night
sky much further south than usual. But like thousands of others, I went to bed
disappointed—there were no low-latitude auroras that night or the next.
The Siberians had been the only ones to enjoy the show.

Perhaps I should have taken those predictions with a pinch of salt. In May, a
huge magnetic storm had smacked into Earth at over 3 million kilometres an hour,
spraying auroras as far south as Oklahoma. Large as the storm was, space weather
forecasters failed to give us a warning. And with the Sun now at a peak in its
11 year activity cycle, the next one could be worse.

Yet an end to mistaken forecasts might be just around the corner. “I think
we’re in the situation that terrestrial weather forecasters were 30 years ago
when they first got satellite data,” says Bernard Jackson of the University of
California, San Diego. Jackson’s new forecasting method picked up a disturbance
a couple of days before the storm hit in May. What’s more, his results cast
doubt on the accepted origins of space storms.

Most scientists agree that a storm is caused by the Sun spewing out a
million-kilometre-long blob of plasma, a coronal …